The Great Terror

Moreover, a Soviet Marshal makes it clear that while some of the officers brought out of camps and rehabilitated gave good service, in many cases the men concerned had been ruined: “the moral, and often also the physical sufferings undergone in the prisons and camps had killed in them all the will, initiative and decisiveness necessary for a military man.” He gives the example of a general (a Civil War hero who had been wounded eleven times) who was arrested and sentenced in 1939 to twenty years’ imprisonment without any charges being presented apart from the simple formula “enemy of the people.” In a camp of “severe regime,” he became a bath attendant and was given five years more for stealing a few underclothes. He was released in 1943 and made Chief of Staff of an Army, but his sufferings had broken his character.⁴²

The “Horse Marshals” commanded in 1941—all three from the old First Cavalry Army. Timoshenko, in the center, proved reasonably competent, though he, too, suffered heavy losses. On the southern and northern flanks, Budenny and Voroshilov were merely catastrophic, especially the former. Stalin’s other protégé, Marshal Kulik, came to grief in a clumsy operation before Leningrad. General Tyulenev became involved in the disasters in the Ukraine. All four were removed, but none was shot (except, apparently, Kulik, but only after the war). As late as 1957, Tyulenev was defending Stalin’s Lwów operations of 1920, the old wound in the side of the Soviet Army which had festered so long and so desperately.

With superior Soviet resources and vastly lengthened German communications, it was still only possible to avoid total defeat for three reasons. First was the continued existence of further reserves. Second was Allied aid. Third, and most important, was the selection of better commanders. This could only be done in the course of the endless battles of the great retreat. The incompetents who had been put in to replace an adequate command in 1937 and 1938 were weeded out by disaster. A new and efficient command was created by natural selection in the struggle itself. It was purchased, in fact, with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, with hundreds of miles of Russian territory, and with a great prolongation of the war.

Tukhachevsky’s military doctrines were reinstated in the directives of the Stavka

for the counter-offensive at Moscow in 1941. The turn had come. But, as a Soviet Army officer once remarked to the author, it was owing to the purges that the road to Berlin involved the long and painful detour via Stalingrad.

Far from the Great Purge eliminating a Soviet fifth column, it laid the foundation for one throughout the country in 1941 to 1945. This was the first war fought by Russia in which a large force of its citizens joined the other side.

Among the more brilliant younger officers who had survived the Purge was General Vlasov. In the maneuvers of 1940, his Ninety-ninth Division had proved the best. A tall, powerful man with a stentorian voice and a fine flow of invective, he was, Ilya Ehrenburg tells us, popular with the troops and in favor with Stalin, who could not recognize a genuine potential “traitor.”⁴³

Vlasov, when captured, organized the Russian troops on the German side, in spite of great difficulties with the Nazi authorities. His program shows that he was entirely out of sympathy with Nazism, and only concerned with a democratic Russia—he was comparable, in fact, to the Irish revolutionaries of 1916 who sought German support against Britain, or the Burmese and Indonesians of the Second World War who came to agreements (or tried to) with the Japanese against the West. As a Polish prisoner in Russia remarks more generally, of the expectations in the labor camps:

I think with horror and shame of a Europe divided into two parts by the line of the Bug, on one side of which millions of Soviet slaves prayed for liberation by the armies of Hitler, and on the other millions of victims of German concentration camps awaited deliverance by the Red Army as their last hope.⁴⁴

Ehrenburg’s implication that Stalin was effective at dealing with imaginary traitors is sound. In 1941, he destroyed the last remnants of alternative political leadership. Antipov was apparently shot on 24 August. In September, the survivors of the 1938 Trial still in prison—Rakovsky, Pletnev, Bessonov—were retried and shot, as was Maria Spiridonova, the Social Revolutionary leader. In October, two more political figures, former members of the Central Committee Goloshchekin and Bulatov, were shot with the Shtern–Loktionov group of officers.

It seems that such acts were widespread. A Pole mentions, in the Yertsevo camp, two generals, four lawyers, two journalists, four students, a high-ranking NKVD officer, two former camp administrators, and five other assorted nobodies being selected and shot in June 1941.⁴⁵